Emma Cocker is a writer-artist and Associate Professor in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University, UK. Her research enquiry unfolds at the threshold between writing/art, involving diverse process-oriented, dialogic-collaborative and aesthetic-poetic approaches to working with and through language. Cocker often works in collaboration with other artists on durational projects, where the studio-gallery or site-specific context is approached as a live laboratory for shared artistic research. Cocker’s writing has been published in Failure, 2010; Stillness in a Mobile World, 2010; Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Thought, 2011; Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art, 2012; On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, 2013; Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line, 2017; The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice, 2018; Live Coding: A User's Manual, 2023, and in the solo collections, The Yes of the No, 2016, and How Do You Do?, 2025. Cocker is co-founder of the international Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research. See also https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2985-7839

Symposium: Contingent Agencies


In September, I am in Vienna participating in the Contingent Agencies symposium. More here.

Contingent Agencies is an artistic research project conceived as an inquiry into atmospheres― the subtle, dynamic, complex, and enveloping presences that emerge in given situations for those who inhabit them. More particularly, this project investigates the specific ways in which the agencies of single components of a situation (from light to animals, artifacts to sounds, matter to vegetation, traffic to color …) condition the emergence of these all-over and senseful presences.
 
In this concluding symposium, a cross-disciplinary group of researchers will address this complex subject matter as well as the specific research methodology developed in this project, based on practices of notation and reflection in diverse media. Participant researchers will be Karen Barad, Arno Boehler, Emma Cocker, Gerhard Dirmoser, Mika Elo, Tim Ingold, Sabina Holzer, Paula Kramer, Lambros Malafouris, Erin Manning, Dieter Mersch, Hans Jörg Rheinberger, and Andreas Spiegl, together with the principal investigators Nikolaus Gansterer and Alex Arteaga and the head of the Zentrum Fokus Forschung Alexander Damianisch.
 
Agencies and atmospheres will be inquired from a multi-perspective approach with contributions from artistic research (somatics, choreography, drawing, sound, video, photography, language-based practices) philosophy, archeology, anthropology and physics.
 
This symposium is conceived as an intensive research week articulated in two interconnected parts—a series of public lectures, panel discussions (both accessible onsite and online), and public showings, and an internal program comprising micro workshops and practice sessions.
 
Internal program:
This symposium is articulated in two interconnected parts – a series of public lectures, panel discussions and public showings (see program above) and an internal program of micro workshops and practice sessions. From Monday September 19 to Saturday September 24 a core group of guest researchers (Arno Boehler, Emma Cocker, Mika Elo, Sabina Holzer, Paula Kramer and Andreas Spiegl) together with the key researchers Nikolaus Gansterer and Alex Arteaga will perform different practices of notation and reflection and experiment and implement various tactics of showing and sharing.  Furthermore, together with guest researchers Gerhard Dirmoser, Dieter Mersch, Hans Jörg Rheinberger the whole group will discuss the conceptual framework of the project. The results of these internal working sessions will be presented in the public assemblies.

Venue
Zentrum Fokus Forschung
Rustenschacherallee 2–4
1020 Vienna, Austria